Electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles, which are equipped with batteries and powered by electricity, have recently been put into practical use. Charging facilities (charging control apparatuses) for feeding power to the batteries have also started to be installed in many areas as charging infrastructure.
In order to fully charge the batteries of the electric vehicles, however, a significant amount of power of about a dozen kilowatt-hours (equivalent to average power consumption per household for two to three days) is necessary.
Facilities (grids) for supplying power to the electric vehicles have thus been required to fulfill functions such as a load adjustment function and a power distribution control function, and a next-generation power network referred to as a “smart grid”, in which a means for automatically controlling power supply and demand is incorporated, has attracted attention.
The charging facilities, however, have different infrastructure conditions (e.g., a limit value of current that a power switchboard or a breaker can output, and the amount of power that an electric utility company or a solar photovoltaic system can supply) depending on the area and the system configuration. The electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles are thus required to perform charging control in accordance with the charging facilities connected at their destinations.
To solve the above-mentioned problems, IEC61851, E-Mobility, and so on have been proposed as technology for charging electric vehicles connected to charging infrastructure (in IEC61851, the charging infrastructure notifies the vehicles of values of available power, current, voltage, and the like in real-time at charging; in E-Mobility, the charging infrastructure notifies the vehicles of detailed charging schedules, such as “power of 10 Kwh can be supplied from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 a.m. for 20 yen per kilowatt-hour”). A method in which the charging control apparatus creates a charging schedule based on a charge required by a vehicle, and charges a battery based on the charging schedule has been examined (Patent Document 1).